The Tennessee Valley, drained by the Tennessee River and its tributaries, is an area of approximately 41,000 square miles, including parts of seven States - Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The major portion of the valley lies in Tennessee. The Tennessee Valley Authority was created by Congress in 1933 to develop the Tennessee River system in the interest of navigation, flood control, and national defense, and to generate and sell surplus electricity to avert waste of water power. Properties in the vicinity of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, were transferred to the Authority. TVA's integrated water control program requires not alone the proper use of water resources, but, of necessity, the conservation and preservation of the land resources of the region. Educational and recreational programs have been established in cooperation with local educational agencies for TVA employees and their families in the towns that lie within the Authority's jurisdiction. Perhaps less important, but nonetheless significant, are the opportunities for employment on the construction projects and the standards set by the TVA in handling its large labor force. Workers are employed on the basis of special tests developed in cooperation with the United States Civil Service Commission. They are entitled to organize according to their own preferences, and labor and management work together on employee problems. Since construction work is necessarily temporary, the TVA's job training program not only contributes to work efficiency but allows employees to prepare themselves for other work when the TVA job is finished. During the fiscal year ending June 30, 1938, approximately 8,000 job training meetings were held with an attendance of 63,071, and 4,034 adult education meetings drew an attendance of 79,129. Little is known concerning the coming of the first Negroes to Tennessee, but there is reason to believe that they were in the territory much earlier than is commonly supposed. It is probable that Negroes were with De Soto when he camped near the present site of Memphis in 1541, since they were known to have been with him when he left Spain the previous year. A century later the French are reported to have sent "an army of 1,200 white men and double that number of red and black men who took up their quarters in Fort Assumption, on the bluff of Memphis." The next Negro to set foot on Tennessee soil seems to have been with Colonel James Smith and a group of Long Hunters who explored the Cumberland country in 1766. Known to history merely as "Jim" this "mulatto lad" inspired a stanza in Colonel Smith's diary. Another "negro fellow" accompanied James Robertson in 1779 when he came down from the Holston Settlement to the site of what is now Nashville. The new settlers brought Negroes with them and by 1790, when the first census was taken, there were 3,417 slaves in the Territory. Six years later, when Tennessee became a State, there were 10,613 Negroes in a population of 77,282. As a result of the invention of the cotton gin and the rapid growth of the cotton industry, slavery was widely expanded between 1790 and 1835. By 1840 Tennessee had 183,057 slaves whose per capita value was about $550 as compared to less than $100 in 1790. TVA was instructed to take on the problems presented by devastating floods, badly eroded lands, a deficient economy, and a steady outmigration—all in one unified development effort.
